Reliable access to data avoids costly downtime

MatrikonOPC Tunneller dependably retrieves and presents OPC data from different PLCs in a Windows domain, for monitoring and control purposes at the RWE nPower Tilbury power station

RWE nPower Tilbury is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by nPower, part of RWE.

The Tilbury extended jetty facilities allow it to directly import a variety of coals using ships of up to 70,000 tonne capacity.

The station began full operation in 1968 and is located in Essex on the north bank of the River Thames.

Tilbury can generate 1,050 megawatts of electricity, which is fed into the National Grid.

This is enough power to meet the needs of some 1.4 million people - equivalent to 80% of the total population of Essex.

The Tilbury coal-fired power station upgraded a legacy hard-wired control desk to an automated software system.

To optimise this upgrade they needed to dependably retrieve and present OPC data to the RTAP application on Linux, from different PLCs in a Windows domain for monitoring and control purposes.

Initially Tilbury used a custom, third party OPC client scan task that relied on another third party implementation of DCOM for Linux.

They reported that "this solution was flaky and relied on DCOM".

DCOM comes with many liabilities.

These may manifest themselves as an inability to connect the OPC client and server application, unpredictable communication loss, application crashes and uncontrollable timeouts.

To avoid huge downtime costs, maintain production levels and protect its overall investment Tilbury required a reliable and supportable solution that did not use DCOM and could provide OPC connectivity to their Linux application.

Because nPower required a solid and supportable solution they were secure in choosing MatrikonOPC, the largest OPC developer in the world, as their provider.

Tilbury used MTKOPC Tunneller to provide robust Inter-domain OPC communication.

Data from Mitsubishi and Siemens devices is drawn seamlessly via Tunnelling technology to their RTAP application in Linux by the MTKOPC client for RTAP.

The MatrikonOPC Tunneller, an off-the-shelf solution, eliminates the DCOM issues and allows for redundancy at application and hardware levels.

Adding redundant components significantly increased both fault tolerance and system reliability for the nPower Tilbury plant.

"The removal of the risks associated with a 3rd party DCOM stack for Linux and the provision of a robust dual redundant, self monitoring communication channel are a huge benefit" says Keith Chappell of nPower: "It is important to remember that a temporary communications glitch may trip the unit and that it takes some hours to return a tripped unit to service even if the fault was transient".

MatrikonOPC tunnelling technology instantly provided access to real-time process data and raised the level of reliability for the nPower Tilbury operation, averting huge downtime losses.

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